Save this article Printer version Email this article Discuss this article Larger + | Smaller -

If it wasn't for the latest running shoes, the lycra swimsuit and the Kevlar fencing uniform, Angie Darby could be mistaken for a 17th-century swashbuckler. Each day, she wields a sword, shoots a pistol, rides a horse, runs for miles and swims for all she’s worth. Indeed, the 20-year-old student from Melbourne is preparing to go into battle using each of these skills, but it is not to defend the honour of any king… rather, it is to honour her country at the 29th Olympiad, being held in Beijing, China, later this year. After just two and a half years of training, Angie is the only woman to qualify for Australia’s 2008 Olympic team for the modern pentathlon, and she’s working around the clock to make her coaches, her family, her country and herself proud.

5am: Angie’s alarm goes off and she makes herself get out of her cosy bed and head to the swimming pool at either Melbourne Grammar School or Melbourne University, where she’s completing a degree in architecture. “I cope with the early mornings by not thinking about them. As soon as I hear the alarm, I just get up and go... I’m a bit like a robot,” she says with a smile.

read on below advertisement

5.30am: At the pool Angie’s swimming coaches, Buddy and Dave, are waiting to put Angie through her paces in preparation for the 200-metre freestyle swim that forms one component of the modern pentathlon course. “I competed in swimming at state level in high school, but I was a backstroker so I’ve had to work hard on my freestyle to get up to speed,” says Angie. It was Buddy who first suggested Angie go into pentathlon three years ago. “When I was doing my HSC I couldn’t dedicate as much time to swimming as I needed to if I was going to go anywhere with it, and by the time I started uni I was needing a new focus to keep me motivated. That’s when Buddy told me about another swimmer he’d been coaching who’d gone into pentathlons,” she recalls. “I thought he was joking at first because the only other thing I could do was showjumping, but it was this unusual combination that actually made me the perfect candidate for the sport.”

Angie decided to call Modern Pentathlon Australia’s (MPA) national coach, Gerry Adams, to arrange a meeting. “I thought it was a bit weird to be mixing swimming and running with horse riding, let alone pistol shooting and fencing, but when Gerry told me the story of why the sports were combined, I was hooked,” recalls Angie. The story begins with the founder of the modern Olympics, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who based the modern pentathlon on the tale of a Napoleonic military messenger. Legend has it the soldier’s horse was brought down in enemy territory and he was forced to defend himself with his pistol and sword, then swim across a raging river to deliver the message on foot. “The story mightn’t be true, but it’s a good one,” says Angie.

next page »

Comment on this article...   Notebook: is about sharing your comments, ideas, opinions and experience with others. To make a comment you must be a member of myNotebook: Members, please Log in.